ABSTRACT
Korea went through dramatic changes after the Asian financial crisis in 1997. During President Kim Dae-Jung’s administration (1998–2003), extensive neoliberalization took place under the IMF mandate as part of the economic crisis recovery efforts. To be sure, the country had already started to embrace neoliberalism in the late 1980s – with the fall of the authoritarian government and the global spread of capitalism and neoliberal ideology following the end of the Cold War (Choi 2007). However, it was the late 1990s when neoliberalism became more pronounced in Korea, with the state carrying out a series of neoliberal reforms, downsizing the government, and opening the economy to global finance capital (Douglass 2009). The time also coincided with the rapid rise of China, leveraging her abundant low-cost labor and gigantic consumer market potential. Emerging as the largest recipient of foreign direct investments, which included those from Korea, China was rapidly attracting manufacturing activities from all over the world (Douglass 2009). Not only was Korea pressured to find its new economic growth engine, but her cities – especially those based on the industrial manufacturing industries – began to face steep competition to attract and retain globally mobile capital.
